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The challenges at home and abroad confronting the new leaders in Beijing are far more profound and dangerous than those facing the United States.

It’s fashionable in certain media and academic circles to find colourful symbolism in the coincidence of the American presidential election on Nov. 6 and the start of the process to anoint the new, fifth generation of Chinese Communist Party leaders on Nov. 8.

The proximity of these events is painted as neatly representing the world’s transit into a new international order.

The unipolar moment of United States’ unchallenged dominance after the collapse of the Soviet Union is over.

Others are on the rise as American slips into relative decline.

China, in particular, sees itself as the world’s next dominant superpower and fulfilment of its long-held view that the last 200 years have been an aberration in human history. The Middle Kingdom is about to resume its rightful position.

Well, maybe. The challenges at home and abroad confronting the new leaders in Beijing are far more profound and dangerous than those facing the United States.

Even so, China’s increasingly combative attitude toward its neighbours, especially Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines over territorial disputes, is already flagged in Washington as a situation fraught with dangers and uncertainties.

President Barack Obama has attempted to reassure his Asian allies and prepared the ground for containment of and engagement with China with his “pivot” of American focus from the Atlantic and the Middle East to Asia.

But the Middle East always has a way of ensuring it is not ignored. There is no prospect of a quick or easy solution to the civil war in Syria, which is a multi-faceted threat.

It is giving stark focus to the political transformation rumbling around the region and producing governments driven by religious ideology in Egypt and Tunisia, while other countries rived by the storms of the Arab Spring, Libya and Yemen remain in turmoil.

Syria is also a proxy war between Shiite Muslim Iran, backing its man, Syrian President Bashar Assad, and the Sunni Muslim rebels financed and armed by Saudi Arabia and the oil-rich potentates of the Gulf States.

But sometimes proxies no longer satisfy the ambitions of their backers.

Iran will remain a great danger to the region. Its stultifying politics of rule by corrupt religious fanatics is a recipe for continued belligerence and progressive economic collapse in the face of international sanctions against its nuclear development program.

The option of a military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities will stay on the table in Washington, especially if Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gets a strong mandate in his election.

The Syrian war has also affirmed Turkey as an increasingly potent and important, but prickly player in the Middle East and in Europe’s dealings with the region.

Events in Syria and Iran have raised yet again serious questions about the utility of the United Nations and its Security Council as agents of international will.

The justification for survival of the Security Council vetoes given to the victors of the Second World War at the founding of the UN — the U.S., Britain, France, Russia and China — gets more bewildering by the day.

Moscow, with China as a largely silent partner, has managed to prevent any meaningful intervention by the UN in Syria, where the Russia has a key naval base at Tartus, and, with somewhat less intense dedication, in Iran.

Washington has some permanent interests in the Middle East, such as its close alliance with Israel, but other magnet pulls are changing.

America’s combat role in Iraq ended in 2010 and will end in Afghanistan in 2014.

Obama has morphed George W. Bush’s “War on Terror” into a campaign of extra-judicial killings of suspected al-Qaida operatives using missile-equipped drone aircraft in the lawless regions of Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia and, in all likelihood, soon in al-Qaida-held northern Mali.

And the Middle East’s old pull for U.S. attention — its oil reserves — is not as important as it was. Energy self-sufficiency — with Canadian assistance — is a real prospect for America.

Last year, for the first time in 15 years, imported oil was less than half that consumed in the U.S. By 2035, shale gas is expected to account for about half of all U.S. energy production.

The European Union and its 27 member states remains America’s most important trade partner. It is this relationship rather than America’s symbiotic relationship with Chinese manufacturing industries that will determine whether the North Atlantic basin finds a new era of economic growth, innovation and functional administrations.

These are all, to crib from former U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s notebook, known knowns and known unknowns.

But it is always the unknown unknowns that warp the course of history.

Or, as former British prime minister Harold Macmillan is said to have replied when asked what he most feared: “Events, dear boy, events.”

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Jonathan Manthorpe: U.S. foreign policy faces known knowns, known unknowns with Obama re-election